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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm your host, travis Moss. Welcome back to season five. We've got our co-host, dave Nurchey, with us. We're talking about the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and today's point kind of a mouthful. Focus on the road, not the wall. There are a thousand things that can go wrong. Focus on where you are going. This is another one of those Travis's. I don't know if this was Ben's words or my words. We're getting to the point where I've got inspirations from the book where it's beyond just like the main points, and so the wordier ones kind of tend to be me paraphrasing a little bit. But before you get into that, this is brought to you by one big thing podcast. Learn how to reframe your challenges, overcome the things that are holding you back, and you can get more info.
Speaker 1:
I NQR media on YouTube. If you like what you hear, please subscribe. We've got 31,000 some odd subscribers. Please join us, give us a review, leave some comments, have some fun. Alright, dave. Focus on the road. This is a mouthful. Focus on the road, not the wall. There are 1,000 things that can go wrong. Focus on where you are going. You want to take the first shot at that.
Speaker 2:
Sure, yeah, I think it's kind of a continuation of what what we were saying a little bit last episode, but I I'd kind of just go deeper into, uh, the purpose of behind what you're doing and kind of some discipline behind it. Right, people talk about motivation a lot, but I think discipline is part of that. So you're going to be along the road, you're going to be trying to accomplish things and obstacles come up, right, so that's the wall. They could deter you from it. Or you could keep your focus of why you started in the first place.
Speaker 2:
Right, what is the end goal here? What is the bigger purpose and meaning behind what you're doing? So those thousands of things that can go wrong become little hurdles that you don't really think twice about. Right, you just figure out your way to get past it and you keep focusing on what your goal is. So I think for me it's really you know what? Why'd you start this? What is the purpose behind it? And how do you keep the discipline? How do you not let those things get in the way of what you're trying to accomplish?
Speaker 1:
That's good, I have a completely different perspective on it. That, I think, compliments what you're talking about that I think complements what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:
Okay, when I first thought of the road and the wall part, I envisioned driving a car and just looking straight ahead, not really thinking about the road at all. You're just staring straight ahead and it's dark at night and you're just driving and you're getting closer and closer to this wall. That that's just. It looks like it's right at the end of the road. There's just this big giant stone wall at the end of the road and you just keep staring at the wall, going, why is there a wall there? Why is there a wall there? And for some reason you can't stop and you just plow right into the wall. Yeah, yep. And you know, if you step back and you kind of you, that they basically don't allow you to be. And we started Unleashing Leadership with a show about adaptability. They don't allow you to be adaptable at all, to say, hey, you know what? I need to go left here before I hit that damn wall. And I think that that that thousand part gets gets us to.
Speaker 1:
And we had a great quote from one of our employees on a newsletter this week. I don't know if you remember off the top of your head, but it was about not being afraid, yep, and we talk about our just cause with the organization trying to overcome challenges, which, you know, really came out of a softening of the word fear to be to try to include more people that didn't want to admit that they were afraid and so they would just say they have challenges. But so much of life is about these fears and you know, there's a thousand things that can come and get you. In fact, there's a million things. There's so many things that can just fuck up your day and your week and your year and the rest of your life. Um, that will just like that, seem like they're the end of the world, but they happen to people all the time, and all the time people overcome them, they continue on and they go on and do amazing things. Again back to our last episode.
Speaker 1:
The difference is you sit around and pout when something happened to you or you go, okay, it happened and you move on because, if you think about it, you're in the car and there's all these thousand, you know, other vehicles driving around, they could all hit you, right, they're all. You're in the passing lane and they're in the slow lane right and, and every now and then one of them juts out to try to pass somebody else in the slow lane, and you got to slow down, right. So if you're too afraid to pass them because one of them could, you know know, jet out into the passing lane, you might as well just get in the slow lane and follow them Right, Cause that's where you're going. See, you can't be afraid of passing. You know these things and, yeah, you know what.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes you might have an accident, but it happens to just about everybody at some point in their life, you know. So you can't not try to go do things. So you can't, like, just be staring at the wall and be like I can't get off the, I can't take one of these side roads, because if I do, I I won't get where I'm supposed to go.
Speaker 2:
If, in fact, in front of you is a giant brick wall. Yeah, it's a, a lot of. It's like the the saying. You know it's not.
Speaker 1:
It's not what happens to you right, it's, it's how you react afterwards. Right like, yeah you get back up.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yep, so I I think that that's a lot of it. I mean kind of hammering the same point home. But the things will come up. You can't avoid it. It's the unpredictable right. So if you, if you're living with the like a block right, A wall, we'll say with a wall in front of you because of all the stuff that can happen to you and you're just going to let it happen to you, in that case right, If you're, if you're acting that way, that's what's going to happen. If you're able to push through and see the road ahead and say this is what I'm doing, then you're not, you're that stuff won't affect you. You're just going to kind of plow right through it.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think sometimes it's because of like a lot of it's because of social media, or if you go online and you see, like everything's telling you where you're supposed to be. I saw one the other day. It was like how much money the average 50-year-old has in their 401k Like, first of all, they don't know that information and we could debate that and I could definitely put that debate to bed, but, second of all, let's pretend they do know that information. It's the average who gives a shit. What's that got to do with you, right? So we, we're walking around with all this anxiety about who we're supposed to be, at what times in our lives we're supposed to be there, what we're supposed to have, what success is supposed to look like, all these other things, right, and let me, let me tell you what you know for for everybody who's thinking they're supposed to be something, you're not supposed to be anywhere or anything else other than what you are. What you do today is going to shape who you are, because who you are is the present, right? So the only thing you can do is look at your day and say what can I do today to make me the person that I want to be tomorrow. That's the only thing that you can do. Whatever happens to you, it's happened, it's already happened, it's the past. You've just got to eat it and move on.
Speaker 1:
But if you don't take chances, if you don't go out there and try to do things, then you just you. You cannot become the person that you want to be. You'll be sitting there chewing on your nails until they bleed every day for the rest of your life, afraid that somebody is going to take something away from you or something's going to happen to you and you're going to lose something. And then you're not going to be where you're supposed to be, when nobody gives a damn if you're there or not. It's not written in stone where you're going to be. Who knows the great things day that you can do in your lifetime, or where you can possibly go, or what you can do or or what you know?
Speaker 1:
Your, the chapters of your life are going to unfold, you know, over the next 20 chapters. Nobody freaking knows right. But if you don't allow it to happen because you're too afraid, which is what, it's an epidemic right now. You know people are hiding behind their computers and their, their, their smartphones and all this kind of stuff, afraid to live life, afraid to get out there and try things. And you see, the same thing happens in business. The businesses are oh, we're too afraid to say this, that or the other thing because we don't want to rock the boat. Go out there and rock the boat, you know, let things happen, be respectful in it, but let things happen, take some chances.
